To be fair, the targeting reticule can be so small as to only be the size of a small red circle, and trying to keep track of that whilst manoeuvring your ship, especially with the fluctuating range calculation, it's difficult to even notice if your guns are actually firing or not. Because by the time you glance back at your guns.. your cursor has probably drifted out of the red circle.
I appreciate this long write-up and would like to correspond with you more. An indication guns are firing would help the player understand whether they are.
Sometimes you also kind of just want to eyeball the shots yourself, you know, shoot from the hip? So making it so you can only shoot at ships if your cursor is in the targeting reticule, and have the ship within the (sometimes very) small targeting range.. can feel... Annoying? Un-intuitive? (... Sometimes you also kind of just want to shoot at the asteroids and ship wreck floating in space around you, target practice!)
Automatically holding fire until you're on target prevents you from firing shots that the target could dodge by moving in three dimensions. I understand that thinking in 2D is natural because Starsector is 2D, but in 3D, shots would not be possible.
This can be particularly annoying for fighting smaller ships, since the range calculation and reticule can change so rapidly as the smaller ship is making manoeuvres that.. it becomes pretty much impossible to shoot yourself, without turning on autofiring.
Yeah, that's something I can't fix because the feature is working as intended.
Being able to just eyeball without restrictions means you could just fill a volume of space infront of the path of the manoeuvring ship and still hope to hit, since you're just making a guess that that is where the ship will be once your shots reach their destination.
I added Three Dimensional Targeting to preclude exactly that tactic because targets realistically could dodge in all three dimensions rather than in only two.
You can also see the issue of "Suddenly very short range" for the weapon arcs for like.. PD guns, when they're trying to shoot down missiles and fighters. The range becomes so short when the PD starts to target missiles/fighters, that the guns only start to actually acquire the target and shoot them down when they're like 3/4ths through the total range of the PD. IE, danger close. Which also means that sometimes your PD won't even shoot at fighters and missiles cause it just can't acquire the target, since they're too fast for tracking, and instead is fixated on shooting at a nearby frigate or larger since it can actually target those.
PD isn't targeting missiles? That's not good. Can you reproduce this bug?
Cross-referencing my modlist with other affected folks, subtracting those that I'm confident work without huge problems, Arma Armatura is the only commonality, and removing Arma Armatura solved those issues quickly. Anything else I can offer?
Thanks for your cooperation. Yes! If you can reproduce the steps that lead to the behavior, then I could try to reproduce and study them. First, does it happen every time? Does every station have infinite flux, or only certain kinds of station? Do all kinds of ships not explode when at 0 health, or do only certain kids?